New telepathy test, the sequel.

[Dave Rogers]

What you're going to face outside this forum is a fury of mockery from the scientific community that makes our analysis here pale in comparison.

I think that's very unlikely, actually. I would expect that anything Michel sent to a respectable scientific journal would receive a brief rejection notice in reply, and attract no other attention whatsoever. His experiments aren't even worth the bother of mocking.

Dave

 

[JayUtah]

I think that's very unlikely, actually. I would expect that anything Michel sent to a respectable scientific journal would receive a brief rejection notice in reply, and attract no other attention whatsoever. His experiments aren't even worth the bother of mocking.

Dave

I guarantee the submission editors will be mocking him, but of course not in a way he'll ever hear. But yes, as a practical matter he'll receive nothing more than a curt, form reject letter. And he will be able to attribute to that to whatever ill will he imagines on the part of of mainstream science. If anything, the Internet has given loud voices to people who should never have been listened to because of how little they have to say.

 

[Lothian]

Sorry for not reading the whole thread but why not remove the credibility element and use the vote options in a poll?

Or does any 'effect' disappear when someone who knows the answer they want is not allowed to decide which entries to count and which to ignore?

 

[Michel H]

Sorry for not reading the whole thread but why not remove the credibility element and use the vote options in a poll?

Or does any 'effect' disappear when someone who knows the answer they want is not allowed to decide which entries to count and which to ignore?

The credibility element is unfortunately indispensible.

If I ask "did I write 1, 2, 3 or 4", I won't necessarily find that more than 25% of participants gave the right answer.

These telepathy tests are extraordinary: think that an anonymous guy in Belgium writes and circles a number on his paper, and half an hour later a lady in San Diego, California gives the right answer (or does not, but perhaps in a significant way).

When such extraordinary things happen, you should really expect that some work is necessary to understand and interpret the responses. There are probably some psychological barriers.

 

[Startz]

There is nothing wrong with allowing Michel H to judge credibility...so long as he sees the information that he finds useful and decides whether to count a response BEFORE he sees the actual number in the response. It is not hard to separate the response "4" from whatever comments go along with it.

This is not going to happen though.

 

[Lothian]

The credibility element is unfortunately indispensible.

If I ask "did I write 1, 2, 3 or 4", I won't necessarily find that more than 25% of participants gave the right answer.

These telepathy tests are extraordinary: think that an anonymous guy in Belgium writes and circles a number on his paper, and half an hour later a lady in San Diego, California gives the right answer (or does not, but perhaps in a significant way).

When such extraordinary things happen, you should really expect that some work is necessary to understand and interpret the responses. There are probably some psychological barriers.

Ok here is another variation. People give their response replacing the number with an X. The actual number they pick is sent to someone independent. You then score the responses on credibility. The numbers they picked are then revealed and weighted with your credibility score.

What is extraordinary to people here is that you appear to need to see what people have picked in order to decide how credibile they are. That is a design flaw no one with credibility can accept. Remove that and I think people will be happy. You can then ponder why your results go back to ~25%

Beaten to it by Startz. Michael. Do you object to this minor variation? If so why?

 

[Pixel42]

There is nothing wrong with allowing Michel H to judge credibility...so long as he sees the information that he finds useful and decides whether to count a response BEFORE he sees the actual number in the response. It is not hard to separate the response "4" from whatever comments go along with it.

This is not going to happen though.

It did happen. One properly blinded test, years ago. The result was as you'd expect.

 

[JayUtah]

The credibility element is unfortunately indispensible.

Utterly false. You've made it necessary by deciding to collect not just the data, but also extraneous information that only feeds your additional attempts to rig the experiment. If you just stopped trying to rig the experiment, you'd find you don't need any of that.

If I ask "did I write 1, 2, 3 or 4", I won't necessarily find that more than 25% of participants gave the right answer.

Right, in which case there is no demonstrated effect to explain, and your hypothesis fails. There is no getting around this, no matter how many times you want to call us stupid. You're trying to rig the experiment. You say that even if you get only the results statistically predicted by chance, some of the hits will still be by telepathy and not by chance. You say that even if a guess is a miss, you can tell whether it was an intentional miss on the part of a snarky participant who did read your mind but decided to say something else instead just to toy with you.

So you've introduced a completely subjective and irreproducible variable that allows you to sift the "true" hits from the "false" hits, and the "true" misses from the "false" misses, all the while knowing the answers. As many have pointed out, at that point you might as well throw statistical analysis and p-values out the window because you're literally doing nothing but cherry-picking. No comparison to any expected distribution will have meaning.

These telepathy tests are extraordinary...

No, they really aren't. Either your subjects can guess what you're thinking at a rate better than chance, or they cannot. Once you show there is an effect that requires explanation, then you can construct an additional experiment to explore potential causes. Everything else is covered in the null hypothesis.

As jsfisher says, establishing credibility in the scientific community means paying attention to their expectations regarding methods, protocols, and statistical models. Proposing something that is indistinguishable from cherry-picking and claiming it to be a novel method for exploring a variable that you claim is preventing you from achieving a meaningful p-value otherwise is exactly the sort of nonsense this science has been inundated with for decades. Do you honestly think people haven't tried to rig the data in exactly the same sorts of ways before?

There are probably some psychological barriers.

Yes, but not the ones you think.

 

[Michel H]

Ok here is another variation. People give their response replacing the number with an X. The actual number they pick is sent to someone independent. You then score the responses on credibility. The numbers they picked are then revealed and weighted with your credibility score.

What is extraordinary to people here is that you appear to need to see what people have picked in order to decide how credibile they are. That is a design flaw no one with credibility can accept. Remove that and I think people will be happy. You can then ponder why your results go back to ~25%

Beaten to it by Startz. Michael. Do you object to this minor variation? If so why?

This has been done before:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=9572476#post9572476
but I found that this was complicated, and that the results:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=9608775#post9608775
were less good than when the simpler version of the test is used.

In addition, this is not really necessary because people have an opportunity to verify the credibilities assigned.

 

[JayUtah]

This has been done before:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=9572476#post9572476
but I found that this was complicated...

Yes. Good science sometimes requires complicated protocols to keep people from cheating, either consciously or unconsciously. If you can only get the results you want by simultaneously knowing the value chosen and estimating their credibility, then you will get nowhere in the scientific community.

In addition, this is not really necessary because people have an opportunity to verify the credibilities assigned.

No. It's still based on subjective judgment and therefore irreproducible. A proper protocol must not only eliminate evident cherry-picking, as we find in your previous tests, but also the possibility of cherry-picking. It's not good enough to make a case that no cherry-picking occurred. You have to show that no cherry-picking was possible.

 

[Gamolon]

But I still cannot say in a totally sure way whether an individual answerer used telepathy or just random guessed, I can only speculate on that.

This is the show stopper right here.

Until you can accurately define how a telepathic message differs from a random guess/thought, you cannot continue.

I can easily say that NONE of the "right" answers from your previous tests were telepathic in nature and all were just random guesses. Assessing an answer as being "credible" is impossible because you have no clue if that person is being honest or not, no matter what pleasing or convincing words they write.

 

[Lothian]

This has been done before:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=9572476#post9572476
but I found that this was complicated, and that the results:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=9608775#post9608775
were less good than when the simpler version of the test is used.

In addition, this is not really necessary because people have an opportunity to verify the credibilities assigned.

Why do you think your powers disappeared when cheating was eliminated?

 

[Startz]

Ok here is another variation. People give their response replacing the number with an X. The actual number they pick is sent to someone independent. You then score the responses on credibility. The numbers they picked are then revealed and weighted with your credibility score.

What is extraordinary to people here is that you appear to need to see what people have picked in order to decide how credibile they are. That is a design flaw no one with credibility can accept. Remove that and I think people will be happy. You can then ponder why your results go back to ~25%

Beaten to it by Startz. Michael. Do you object to this minor variation? If so why?

You said it more clearly than I did!

 

[Michel H]

Why do you think your powers disappeared when cheating was eliminated?

They did not, but the results were less good.

I am seeing a 4 very clearly. It's almost as though I had written it myself.

... Early on, I used my telepathic powers to see into your ... mind and pull out the number you were thinking of. You did not feel aggressively towards me back then so your thoughts were very easy to read and you did not change your answer when you knew I was right. ...

 

[JimOfAllTrades]

In addition, this is not really necessary because people have an opportunity to verify the credibilities assigned.

But when Loss Leader verified that you assigned him a completely wrong credibility score you ignored it and continue to lie about his answer.

Why did you not disqualify his answer when you were told your credibility score had no credibility at all.

 

[Lothian]

They did not, but the results were less good.

No. Not one person who stuck to the rules got your number.
It was a failure.

But assume you are right.

Why do you think your results are better when the test allows cheating?

 

[JayUtah]

They did not, but the results were less good.

What do you consider a "good" result?

 

[Pixel42]

What do you consider a "good" result?

This question is the litmus test that distinguishes between scientists and pseudoscientists.

 

[turingtest]

They did not, but the results were less good.

What do you consider a "good" result?

This question is the litmus test that distinguishes between scientists and pseudoscientists.

Michel's method is the epitome of science done backwards. An actual scientific test is a measure of whether a hypothesis is valid; Michel's method is to make the hypothesis the measure of whether the test is valid. When he only counted right vs wrong answers, he got only the results that were indistinguishable from chance; but, since that ran counter to his preferred hypothesis, recourse was made to a "credibility" filter that reversed the results.

Everybody sees this but Michel. Or, possibly, he does see it, and understands it on a professionally dispassionate level, but the part of him that wants passionately to be a special telepathic person shouts down the part of him that knows better.

 

[Michel H]

But when Loss Leader verified that you assigned him a completely wrong credibility score you ignored it and continue to lie about his answer.

Why did you not disqualify his answer when you were told your credibility score had no credibility at all.

I don't think that Loss Leader "verified that I assigned him a completely wrong credibility score" at any point.

Here I would like to point out that the fact that a respected moderator in a respected international educational forum (forum of the Randi Educational Foundation) wrote, in one of my tests:

I am seeing a 4 very clearly. It's almost as though I had written it myself.

and later confirmed:

... Early on, I used my telepathic powers to see into your ... mind and pull out the number you were thinking of. You did not feel aggressively towards me back then so your thoughts were very easy to read and you did not change your answer when you knew I was right. ...

is a huge anomaly, and is not expected at all as a response to a "deluded schizophrenic" trying to do an ESP test on a public forum.

In addition, we know that Loss Leader is far from being alone in making these extraordinary comments. I have for example quoted recently Terra Tourist on Spiritual Forums:

Hey! I got it right. Thanks Michel H for this little experiment. It's funny what you said about guessing the number 1. It's a number I would also typically avoid. But this time, I believe I did see you writing it on a page, so that's why I went with it, despite my knee-jerk reluctance.

Thanks again.

(http://www.spiritualforums.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1423682&postcount=23, note the striking analogy with Loss Leader's first post).

This means that the "just mentally ill patient" theory favored by the pseudo skeptics is in principle ruled out, there seems to be something going out which leads people to say extraordinary things in my tests. This is simple, logical and scientific.

Think for example about "The supernatural" thread, started by heydarian saeed, in which he claims that the Quran made actually some remarkable predictions which prove its validity:

I will send it paragraph by paragraph. Please read.
Article on understanding and proving the transcendental
Saeed Heydarian Yazdali
(Bachelor of Occupational Health Engineering. Beheshti University of Medical Sciences. Iran. Kashan)
Review:
In this article, in order to prove the existence of the supernatural, I tried to examine the previous opinions in this regard and draw conclusions from it. If this is true, my attempt is to arrive at objective evidence to understand and prove it. And I will present a new article in this regard.
Given that my religion is Islam, I used the Quran, which is a documentary. And my method of reasoning is to use the verses of this book to examine the experiences of scientists in the field of astronomy, space and medicine in this regard.
I concluded at the end of the article to prove the existence of the supernatural. Also, to find out through material testing in the laboratory, I tell you that the existence of transmaterial can be realized and seen.
Keywords: God, matter, nature, supernatural, soul

Can you imagine that a respected moderator on this forum agrees with such ideas, and confirms later that he agrees?

Obviously, this has never been seen, but unusual things did happen in my threads.

Giordano's post is also of interest:

please note that I am not questioning the validity of your beliefs, only if the approaches some others have taken are likely to change them. I base my opinion on the history of this thread. I really do not think that there is a reason to question your beliefs on this forum, and that perhaps is the point that I was trying to make.
As I have said in the past, I only wish you good fortune and peace of mind!